Almost one month after the
release of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) in five languages – English,
French, German, Spanish and Japanese, Microsoft finally announced the
availability of Windows Vista SP1 in 31 more languages as of Tuesday.
On the Windows Vista Team Blog,
Chris Flores noted on behalf of Microsoft: “Starting today, users will be able
to choose to manually install Windows Vista SP1 via Windows Update or download
the standalone installer from the Microsoft Download Center (x86 and x64) for
any of the 36 supported languages.”
Flores also added that TechNet
Plus and MSDn subscribers will be able to download DVD images of Windows Vista
with SP1 in some languages as of April 15, while the rest of the languages will
become available in 2 groups over the next few weeks.
“Windows Vista SP1 will bring
some great improvements to PCs running Windows Vista especially in the areas of
security, reliability, and performance,” the same blog notes.
When asked about a date for an
automatic update, a spokesperson for the company responded, as quoted by
Computer World: “We want to ensure customers have the best possible experience
with Windows Vista, including installing SP1; this has always been our
priority. Until SP1 is automatically distributed via Windows Update, consumers
are able to download SP1 manually using Windows Update.” The conclusion: users
still need to wait for an automatic download, and there’s no news on a possible
date in the near future.
In the meantime, here are the 31
languages added to Windows Vista SP1: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (simplified),
Chinese (Traditional) and Chinese (Hong Kong S.A.R.), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian,
Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian,
Polish, Portuguese (Brazil) and Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Serbian
(Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian.